I have never really considered Ian McEwan in the top rank of writers. I enjoy his books, but they tend to rely just a bit too much on some sort of horror, whether physical or psychological, and whether completely serious or served up with a dose of black humour. If, as Martha Nussbaum tells us, the best fiction teaches us how to live by showing us situations where we can imagine what choices we might make, McEwan's books often seem just outside the realm of normality, the realm that I could imagine inhabiting. Some of that same horror threatens Saturday, but the effect is different: more believable, less an end in itself, perhaps simply the backdrop against which we all, post 9/11, live our lives.
Saturday traces a single day in the life of a London brain surgeon, Henry Perowne. The story takes place on 15 February 2003, the day of the huge public protest against the war on Iraq, and at one level the plot is extremely simple: Henry, going about his Saturday errands and preparing for a family reunion that evening, narrowly escapes a mugging. As the reunion gets underway, the mugger shows up again; and this time, escaping is not so easy.
Surrounding this apparently simple framework is a richly detailed exploration of the thoughts, ideas and concerns that run through Henry’s day. Henry is a sort of upper-middle-class Everyman, and McEwan has intentionally given him a picture-perfect life: ‘I thought,’ he said in a recent interview, ‘what would happen if you’ve got a man who is not about to get divorced or disastrously fall in love and wreck his life, who doesn’t have a terminal disease and is not alienated, whose children are not drug addicts and who has a pleasing relationship with his wife?’ Through Henry, McEwan explores arguments for and against the Iraq war; the competitive pride and aggression evoked by a squash game; the rivalry between two family poets; the satisfactions of brain surgery; the grief and tenderness evoked by a senile parent; the mystery of children whose talents and interests are entirely different from your own; and a great recipe for fish stew. Below this, though, runs the darkly murmuring threat: no matter how comfortable you are, how perfect your life is, or how rationally you behave, the border between safety and danger, life and death, the protection or destruction of those you love is perilously easy to breach. Not simply because the world is random and brutal; but because your own actions rebound in ways that you neither intend nor foresee.
A lighter theme is Henry’s own lack of sympathy for literature, which evokes considerable irony from McEwan. Henry’s daughter Daisy continually assigns him novels to read: he finds Anna Karenina ‘apt and convincing enough, but surely not so very difficult [to write] if you were halfway observant.’ Writing poems is ‘rather occasional work, it appears, like grape picking’. The statement: ‘This notion of Daisy’s, that people can’t “live without stories, is simply not true. [Henry] is living proof,” is, of course, uttered by someone who exists only in a story. In the end, Henry is saved by a poem; the mugger, brutal and half-mad as he is, is much more alive to the power of poetry than Henry is.
Prosaic though he is, Henry is not immune to wonder, but his wonder is for life itself, summed up by McEwan in a sentence too lovely to paraphrase, as Henry relaxes after a late-night emergency brain operation: ‘The wonder [remains], that mere wet stuff can make this bright inward cinema of thought, of sight and sound and touch bound into a vivid illusion of an instantaneous present, with a self, another brightly wrought illusion, hovering like a ghost at its centre.’ Saturday struck me as somehow very Sea of Faithish, though not in the obvious sense where characters struggle with the loss of faith, nor because of the unexpected appearance of ‘that’ poem at a critical point in the story. Rather, because McEwan seems so in love with life itself, normal life, the ‘brief privilege of consciousness’ that we all share, and that we protect so fiercely against threats at whatever level. A phrase from Darwin (another book Daisy insists he read!) haunts Henry throughout the day: ‘There’s grandeur in this view of life’. Whether it refers to Henry’s faith that we will eventually understand consciousness, to Darwin’s portrayal of the ‘endless and beautiful forms of life’, or to McEwan’s own attitude towards his story and his characters, it summarises the basic attitude of the book: to plumb everyday life itself, the good and the bad, the gains and the losses, is grandeur enough. In showing us that, McEwan takes his place in the top echelon of writers, who suggest to us that our lives, too, given sufficient attentiveness, can be grand.
Patti Whaley is SoF Treasurer.
Saturday by Ian McEwan. Jonathan Cape, London, 2005. 279 pages. £17.99. ISBN 0224072994.